


Cat and Mouse

by Hikou



Series: Spiral [8]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Death, Drug Use, F/M, Graphic Violence, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-10-24 01:52:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10731699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hikou/pseuds/Hikou
Summary: Turk missions don't go wrong.Sometimes, they just don't go... right.[OC-Tastic, Spiralverse]





	1. October

**Author's Note:**

> Actual summary: In which Reno and Hikou do drugs with rave rats and fuck up the mission.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reno and Hikou do drugs with rave rats and fuck up the mission.

There’s a buzzing in my left ear.

The bass pounds through the air, beating waves of vibration through my lungs and out the back of my ribcage. My vision swims with the flickering lights, eyes washing between color and smoke and faces. Voices are humming around me in some strange synchronic unison.

But there’s this buzzing in my ear.

My head swivels backwards of its own accord and my eyes sweep behind me, where the person should be. Too long earrings sway awkwardly, dusting my bare shoulder. The feeling accentuates the strange sense of nakedness pushing in with no uniform to shield me from these bodies brushing close, and hot, and fast around me.

I’m not used to life below the plate. And I’m not used to these underground parties. The crush of faces is unfamiliar to me and the blaze of lights is abnormally hypnotizing.

 _“—listening?”_ the buzz finally voices.

Snow is in my ear.

Snow is in the sky.

The rafters that overarch the stage are rusted and ragged—just one big, giant tetanus shot—but  somewhere amid the vines of taped electrical cable, Snow is waiting. She’s being patient because she’s confused. There must be something imperative to this plan she hasn’t observed yet, but she’ll wait studiously until it appears.

It won’t.

“Mhm,” I answered dreamily, gazing at no one face for too long.

Reno had suggested it, which usually meant it was a bad idea to begin with, but for some reason I ignored the flag. We needed eyes on the ground; one of us would have to do it, preferably a woman in ‘skank-pants’ he had specified.

Snow had frowned severely. Mikari hadn’t even looked up from her PHS, simply stood and left the room. Elena’s head had flopped to the side, exhausted with the effort of having to hear this man for another moment.

And I had said, “Sure.”

It was usually taboo to question these outbursts of mine, so no objection followed, only stunned silence.

No one had asked and so no one had answered and now, here I stood in a throng of young slummers—a pulsing army of steel and grit, flags of Shinra red burning at the edge of their celebration.

 _“—find him,”_ my ear buzzes again.

And I blink to the left again. Reno is leaning against a pillar there, a familiar dazed look glazing his eyes. A pretty blonde thing is twittering somewhere near him, but his eyes are looking for mine over her head. They house a confused concern.

“Mhm,” I answer again spinning back.

I didn’t know why we were here for him. The burning flags were a fairly large hint, but the music was wordless and soothing. The throng was thick, but rippled slowly. It didn’t _feel_ dangerous.

_“Hikou?”_

Which was probably why Reno and I took a hit of God knows what outside.

_“You need to start moving.”_

They seemed like nice kids, I had thought, but it looked as though Reno was having his doubts now. They had smiled and bobbed their heads and greeted us in the odd restrained way that adolescents do, offering to share whatever monstrosity they had cooked up on the underplate.

Reno had reached first, casually, seeking to inspect.

I had said, _When in Rome_ , and shrugged.

When they all turned, the confusion was palpable. It had been a while since I had made a slip up like this. I covered the shame with a smile and snatched at the boy’s palm too quickly, scooping the pill into my throat in one swift motion.

 Reno had no choice, really.

We all smiled.

 _“On your six! On your six!”_ the earpiece buzzed urgently, but my muscles were too far uncoiled and my motion was slow and snake-like as my neck lulled backwards.

“Mhm,” I answered no one in particular as hands steadied themselves on my shoulders, sweeping down my arms in one smooth and intimate motion. The sensation is electric.

“You stand out,” a voice rumbles behind me. It vibrates against my back with the bass of the music. It’s attached to the hands, I believe.

“We’re supposed to,” I say plainly, catching his dark eyes for only a moment, before returning forward in a display of disinterest that leaves me vulnerable to whatever attack he has prepared.

He’s handsome, I decide distractedly, and commanding. My heart speeds to pump this new feral emotion into my blood, nail it into every blood vessel before we continue. My head sways gently and I make a show to ignore him, finding greater pleasure in the sensation of the earrings swinging against my neck.

“Red suits you,” he tries this time, sidling forward. He must crane his head downwards to be heard as we are rocked slowly against each other in the ocean of people.

Snow’s breath hisses only slightly louder than the static. She’s lost her shot. He’s maneuvered my body between his. Somewhere deep under my eyelids I know this, but I leave them shut. His touch is too addictive. The drug in my system is boiling under his fingers and my mind is screaming _danger_ , but the music outside is too loud for me to understand anything within.

I smile just the same. I am not complimented often.

“It’s kind of you to notice. Most people don’t.”

My blood is heavy with whatever chemical is pulsing through it. My heart is slowing now and my bones are turning to lead while my skin is turning to fire. He doesn’t have to push hard, just gently raise two fingers against my jawbone, and my eyes are centimeters from his own.

“You have beautiful eyes,” he tells me.

I want to smile, but my body is too lazy. “You say that to all the girls.”

“I do,” he tells me. I am vaguely aware of his arms around me. The sensation of touch has been mingled with my perception of sound and I can only hear the beat of how we move. His breath is slow and deliberate. It catches my attention very briefly before he continues; “But I have never seen a girl with eyes that glow.”

“Like a star?” I taunt.

“Or a SOLDIER,” he suggests. His thumb rubs against my cheekbone firmly, but the pressure of his skin against my face is excruciating. His fingers tangle upwards into my hair and pop the wire from my ear on their way up.

Reno is trying to push his way towards us, but he’s stumbling in the crowd. They easily jostle him aside with no idea he’s trying to wade through them. He’ll never be here in time.

“It’s been a lovely party,” I tell the dark man honestly, pretending my speech is not slurred. “I hope that you’ll look good in red too.”

His laugh reverberates against my chest as he dips forward with me. “Baby, your pupils look like black holes. You met Marco at the gate.”

My smile is blissful and drunk. I wrap my arms around his body, fingers spread wide to feel the muscles in his back; a spare hand threads fingers through the belt loop of his pants.

I cannot stand alone. Utterly helplessly.

I try to look sultry, but I could be drooling for all I know. My tongue is swollen and my voice is thick when I repeat, “When in Rome.”

I’m crestfallen at the confusion that glances across his face and my fist swaggers, but still plants firmly against the base of his neck. The movement is habitual but extremely clumsy. I drop hold of the pocket knife I’ve pulled from his belt loop in an effort to remember. This thought requires all of my energy.

The music is too loud.

He barely jumps, maybe as though he’s been stung by a bee, but he can’t push backwards and spasmodically falls forwards on top of me.

“Spinal cord,” I remember aloud, finally.

Boots stomp around my head and on top of the flesh shielding me. He doesn’t grunt, but each impact pushes air outward from his lungs in an unnatural, deflated way.

I focus on breathing.

My heart beats in time with the music. My eyes blink in an unsteady countdown. My head swivels on the ground at each new footstep.

Somewhere there is screaming, but I do not have the concentration to hear it all.

I am distracted by the hot dripping on my neck. The metallic taste I’ve had in my mouth since we dropped below headquarters is suddenly overwhelming, and as I try to turn my head away I glimpse the streak of red that is being ground into my shoulder, dripping somewhere from the man atop me.

The music stops in a screeching rip.

 _When in Rome,_ I think one last hazy time.


	2. Sleepless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hikou and Reno wake up in a glass case of emotion.

The first thing I’m aware of is my breath. It comes in ragged, jolting rips. The air rushes through my mouth and down my throat filling my lungs with an effectiveness similar to water. My brain hasn’t regained proper control and my muscles are pumping on overdrive of their own accord. I am helpless to the spasms.

Slowly, my other senses begin to reconnect themselves.

“Hey, hey, hey,” a voice soothes unnaturally loudly. The waves of sound ricochet off the walls and beat against my skull like the ocean against a rock.

But I feel soft, like sandstone. I’m eroding too fast. I can’t hold onto myself and pull all my pieces back together. I scrape desperately at the ground beneath me, but find only more cold stone that is too sturdy to be my own. It, too, scrapes roughly against me and wears away fragments of fingertips as my hands scramble.

“I’ve got you,” the voice booms again, knocking against the side of my head with a hot rush of air. It’s too much. It’s too close.

My world is unstable as I topple towards the sound. There is no sense of weightlessness only a spinning sensation that tugs at my stomach. I’m being crushed.

“Guh,” is the best my brain can supply, but the command is issued for the eyes to open and it is shakily obeyed.

It’s a sticky strain to pull apart eyelashes caked with dried mascara and blood, but they separate to unveil a world of dingy darkness. The floor is concrete. The walls are steel. The light is caged. His face is purple.

My brain starts organizing the pulses of data into a picture, beginning to understand the sensations surrounding it and begrudgingly accepting the body once more. Reno is sitting across from me on the concrete floor with a hand gripped tightly on either one of my shoulders. His hair is matted in more than one shade of red and his left eye is swollen all the way shut. An impressive looking bruise has bloomed across the side of his face in hues of lavender and stripes of red.

“You got it?” he asks me, looking more uncomfortable than I can ever recall seeing him.

I nod, even though I don’t.

But a quick inventory reveals no injury apart from bruises or scrapes one might be lucky to walk away with after being trampled on a dance floor. An earring is missing and the other hangs lopsidedly, brushing against my shoulder in a manner I now find irritating and distracting. My shoes are strangely missing as well.

“What happened?” the brain wants to know. All of my nerves ache in one unanimous answer as I put a palm to my forehead.

Reno has scooted back a comfortable distance to resume his place against the gray wall. With his head tilted back, I have a better view of the patch of blood ground into his hair. Someone beat the shit out of him.

“Well, for starters,” he began, closing his eyes, “you killed the wrong fucking guy.”

“Debatable.”

“And then,” he continued with great effort, “you passed out in the middle of a rave.”

“Extenuating circumstances.”

His breathing was slow and deliberate. An explosive temper tantrum was brewing behind those eyelids, but the man was doing his damnedest to keep it in check. Perhaps he was simply too exhausted or ill to carry it out with the energy it deserved. “And then we were escorted out of the rave by a bouncer, who was not, in fact, a bouncer.”

“If he—“

Reno’s eye snapped open and a bit of the fire I was used to experiencing flared for a moment, but the flicker died with a wince. “Listen, Hikou,” he started, chopping at the air with an extended hand, “I don’t give a _fuck_ how you want to write the report, but we’re in some deep shit here.”

My lips remained closed.

“Like some serious deep shit,” he reiterated.

“I can see that,” I responded quietly.

“No,” he raged, “I don’t think you do.” He lifted the extended hand upward and proceed to tick off his enumerations with his fingers: “We have no weapons. We have no comlinks or PHS devices. We have _no fucking idea_ where we are or if _anyone else_ knows where we are. We don’t even know who _the fuck_ these people are or what they want.”

I rocked back on my heels, pushing my other palm to my forehead, trying to soothe the brain inside that was now thrashing worriedly. The volume of his voice was nearly as upsetting as the words and I was still too hazy to spring to action.

“Did you see what happened to Snow?” I asked hopefully.

“No.”

“Did you see who took us?”

“No.”

“Do you know how we were transported?”

“No.”

“Have you talked to anyone?”

“No.”

A flood of nausea was coursing through my body. The spinning in my head had finally dropped into my stomach and I slapped both hands to the floor roughly, barely turning my head in time to vomit.

“Goddamnit,” he muttered, looking away. He had pulled both knees to his chest and was resting his elbows against them, hands dangling uselessly in front of him.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and moved to imitate his posture against the wall, realizing for the first time he was staring at the outline of an over-sized concrete door that had blended seamlessly into the wall.

I stared at it with him.

“What do we do?”

“Wait,” he answered.

And so we did.


	3. Telemiscommunications

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we meet Dr. No.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lulz

They take me first and in a sick way it makes me happy.

Reno has been slumped uncomfortably across my lap for a period of time I don’t know how to measure. He has sat vigilantly over me for another unknown period of time that has left him broken and exhausted, so I afford him what little comfort I can offer.

My feet are tingling and numb from not moving for so long and my fingers are tense from clenching to his shirt sleeves. He’s thin and sharp, and his shoulder digs painfully into the side of my thigh, but I’m too afraid that if I shift it might disturb some piece of the purple mask he has buried into my skirt.

I take my shift watching the door silently and diligently. I wait patiently for a body to present itself so that I may rend in two, with an expression more like a soccer mom and less like a bear.

I wait an eternity that passes in a moment when the wall opens inward.

My nemesis stands in the flood of light she has created—unchanging as the rising sun, but she burns cold. The glaring white connotes the ice in her appraising expression. A pencil taps in impatient, confounded notes as she beats it relentlessly against her clipboard in a speed that is beginning to match my flooding heartbeat. Her eyes are a pale shade of blue that glow with exposure and malice.

I decide in that moment that I will kill her.

Carefully, I slip aside and lower Reno’s cradled head to the ground. I’m shaking as I crouch to my knees, but I don’t fall.

She continues to observe, pausing her tapping to bring the pencil eraser thoughtfully to her lips.

My muscles quiver, but unbend with a rigid elasticity I didn’t know they’d been winding up; I rise to my feet and take a step forward.

“Subject B,” she greets quietly.

The words give me pause.

“Come outside,” she invites, gazing at Reno with a pitying expression. “We’ll wake your friend.”

Few other choices present themselves, but I don’t feel trapped or overwhelmed as I move to walk beyond her outstretched hand into the hall. I note the holster strapped beneath her sterile lab-coat with hardly a glance—second nature to a predator, but I don’t feel dangerous either.

I feel old.

Subject B wouldn’t have left the room. She would have settled her curiosity by separating individual vertebrae from this woman’s spine. She would have been a spider inside of this concrete web. She would have abhorred the bright world I stepped out into.

She wouldn’t have felt the trepidation I did, either;she was accustomed to this brand of fear.

But the name shook me in just the manner it was supposed to.

The door closed with a heavy clunk and the woman announced that, “We are going to need some additional blood samples, Subject B.”

My fingers itched at the name, but remained at my sides; and in this way we were one and the same, Subject B and I. A Christmas-colored parade of green and red syringes danced above my head like sugarplum fairies.The thought disgusted me, but I found my mouth could downturn no more.

“For?” The word echoed up and down the empty white hallway, and my eyes followed, but could never quite catch it. I found myself staring at the large black eye of a security camera tucked in the corner instead—was this where the guards were? 

A genuine smile bloomed across her face and only a tiny glimmer of insanity twinkled in her blue eyes. I idly wondered how long it had taken to learn that mask.

“I’m _so_ glad you asked,” she admitted and, again, began shooing me towards an open door.

My bare feet padded silently against the tile, carrying me to an examination room that was built for a dog but sized for a human. The walls are white, but everything not nailed down is made of stainless steel—the sink, the table, the scale, the cruel looking hooks on the wall, the restraints on the bedside—even the cabinet in the corner reflects the fluorescent light.

I set myself atop a table outfitted with no padding. The woman sets to washing her hands at a sink somewhere behind me, though I was sure not for my benefit.

I returned my gaze to the open door.

“You’re familiar with Dr. Hojo?” she asks, snapping a glove against her tiny wrist in the obnoxious fashion all new medical professionals adopt. “Who am I kidding, of course you are,” she decides, waving the thought away with her spare hand before beginning to unwrap her new needle for assembly. "The files list you as being very cooperative. I _do_ apologize for the..." she pauses with a hum, trying to carefully lay the word before her, " _indelicacy_ of the field team."

"And your friend," she adds as an afterthought. "There was no other way to confirm the substance...

I nod absently, not pretending to understand. I can’t see the camera from here.

She has stepped around to the front of the table back into the outskirts of my field of vision. We stare at each other for a brief moment before I understand what payment she requires of the story. I extend my fist into her waiting hand and she sets to work feeling for the vein she wants and stabs the needle much more like a veterinarian than a doctor.

“You see,” I still don’t look, “we are attempting to complete Project S.”

I turn to look at her for the first time since entering the examination room, appalled by the way she has dropped the ball like a Bond villain. She’s filling to her bursting point in time with the vial on the table. Her expression is full of hope and tells a tale of unrequited aspiration. It’s beginning to fade the longer she stares at me, so I turn my attention back to the door.

“You don’t understand?” she realizes.

I don’t answer.

“You—“ she begins, but is too afraid to continue. “You _are_ Subject B?”

They aren’t questions, no matter how she inflects them.

I can hear the pain and panic in her voice, but she keeps the volume controlled, as though whispering in a church, “The remaining subjects did not survive.”

She sits next to me on the table. Her hands clapped together, dangling uselessly between her legs as she slumps forward. She’s close enough for me to snatch the handgun under her coat, but I don’t. My silence seems to encourage her inappropriate sharing, and for the first time in a very long time, I want to know more.

She heaves a large sigh, “If they drugged the wrong girl, I swear.” What she swears, I’ll never know. “The field team is useless. They still haven’t recovered the remaining specimens from the Genesis Project.”

My eyes dart at the word, my neck snapping to accommodate them.

The empty, white wall greets me instead of the empty, white woman, and the sound of a large, slapping _thump_ —the sound of my bare footfalls amplified—rises from the floor. The jostling of the table knocks the vial to the ground and it hangs suspended from my arm like a pendulum on a grandfather clock, ticking slower and slower in time with my heart—urging it to _stop beating_.

 The woman’s feet poke around the obscuring steel table, haloed in a mess of red and pink and white.

I can’t see her face, but judging from the angle of the oversized silencer pointing to the heap of flesh, this is where the exit wound to be. There must not be much left of those pretty blue eyes.

_Genesis Project_.

The ice in my veins is beginning to bubble, rocketing towards a rage I don’t know how to contain. I slam my fist to the table and the sheet metal ripples like a thundercloud, bending inward forevermore.

On the other end of the ridiculous gun, a woman in a familiar shade of navy blue is trying to gather a response. A normal person would flinch and although she looks ragged, confused, and _worried,_ this response has been removed from her repertoire. The steel door of the open cabinet sways tellingly behind her.

She has a black bag on her shoulder and a few more under her eyes. She wants to ask something, but she still isn’t sure what.

She doesn’t lower the gun.

_“Goddamnit,_ Snow,” is all I can think to say. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> /closet


	4. Professional Griefers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we meet some unexpected Guests.

I snatch the weapon from her hands and she lets it go with a contemptible, “You’re welcome.”

I don’t have time to look back, whether I have a response or not. I’m crouching next to the dead woman’s corpse, pulling a familiarly fashioned keycard away from the pens pinned in her chest pocket until the tiny cord connecting the two snaps back with elastic fury. The crime scene squishes between my toes and leaves a trail of squelching footprints behind me as I head towards the hall.

It still sits there, in the far left corner. It probably shares a power source with the dully blinking keypad that sits halfway below it in the concrete wall. My eyes reflect back at me through shiny opaque glass; the barrel of a gun points between them and explodes into a thousand pieces.

I drop the weapon I’d stolen from her to the floor and kicked it behind me towards the open wall of concrete on the right. Snow’s mouth opens as she watches the display. At first I believe it to be shock, but words begin to shape on her lips, ready to let lose the fire that’s been sparking behind her eyes.

I turn my back before they escape.

Bloody footprints stamp behind me and my fingers scratch at the keypad. Reno is still unconscious in the cell. I’m not sure if she knows he’s there and maybe this is why she hesitates behind me before the scuffing sound of her boots follows behind me.

I press the keycard too hard against the censor. The _ding_ of the door rattling open would have sounded no matter how hard I press.

I turn to look back for the first time.

Snow is leaning to the side, large black armory bag dangling tiredly from her drooping hand. Her other hand is braced against her hip in an exhausted fashion. Her expression is that of an exasperated parent. She’s awaiting an explanation. She wants to know where my brother is and why we got detention.

She has been chasing us for hours. Maybe days.

How the fuck should I know.

I take the bag from her hand and shoulder it with the nonchalance of an ox. I contemplate simply turning and moving forward into the prison-lit cavern that extended beyond the door, but can’t settle comfortably on the idea.

“What the fuck are these people doing?” she finally wants to know.

We both want to know, really.

“Making monsters,” I tell her plainly.

I can watch the incredulity hit her face at the same moment as the words reach her ears. She’s not disbelieving, but appalled at the vagueness of my answer. Snow is not a woman in a position to receive excuses or tolerate double entendre. Snow is schooled and direct. It’s the reason she is effective.

“Which ones?” she replies pointedly.

I think about leaving again, but I can still see the thoughts spinning in her head. I don’t know much about Snow, I consider for the first time. I don’t know much about Reno or even really Rude. I have less idea who they were before they donned the blue uniform than they do about my origins.

“Ones like me,” I tell her and the shock on her face leaves me enough time to spin on my heel.

Her hand grips my elbow in a trembling vice. She knows she can’t hold me back without taking down the hall, but she knows I’m ready to go. She’s not ready to let me. She hasn’t finished her thought yet.

She doesn’t tell me what it is, but she takes the bag off of my shoulder and steps ahead of me down the hallway.

As per usual, little has transpired between us but at the same time much has.

She doesn’t ask me where Reno is. She wants to know, “Who is Genesis?”

He is a great many things, so it takes me a moment to find the answer. He’s a SOLDIER, but so were many men; and he had passed some time as a mentor, but that wasn’t the crux of it; he wasn’t quite Sephiroth, but…

“An experiment,” I realize aloud. The words seem too taboo to speak aloud. I close my lips before more secrets spill forth, unsure why they’re worth hiding.

She holds her silence until I can stand no more.

“Something’s wrong,” I admit. “Something is wrong with The Company. The Company has done something wrong.” Usually these things mean little to us, but, “It’s going to eat us from the inside out.”

“I know,” she responds cryptically.

“I’m going to find out what this is,” I hold up the keycard to her to reveal the familiar crest, logo, household name, watermarked beneath the numbers on the plastic. “I’m going to stay as long as it takes.” It’s Shinra red. “I don’t give a fuck about the rest of it anymore.”

We don’t split up when the halls diverge. We don’t discuss which route is best. We prowl silently, following a track we’ve suddenly both been set into. So we are side by side when we enter the room at the end of the hall.

A woman in a long red dress sits on a mahogany desk in the middle of a stone room. It has been sparsely furnished in faded trappings of wealth. A long slit in the fabric reveals her stockinged thighs as they uncross and recross, maintaining her balance as her torso arches towards us. A pale white arm grips a standard issued handgun.

It is pointed at the shiny bald head of a man in a blue suit. He kneels before her, hands tied carefully behind his back.

I turn to Snow for an explanation, but find her looking down at her pocket in horror. A PHS sits inside.

A call home was placed.

“What else has Rufus sent me?”

I shift the bag on my shoulder. I am unaccustomed to pretty things and do not know how to respond to this woman. I could generally expect to plow my way through most armies and bribe my way through most scientists, but I didn’t understand how this creature operated. I didn’t know what to offer it. I wasn’t sure if I should break it.

Rude glanced up, looking strange without his glasses. His eyes floated between myself and Snow. He was pressed and polished compared to us—I, half naked and covered in blood, and she, crumpled and running on nothing but fumes. He observed, but did not make any attempt to piece together the story. His eyes instead continued upward towards the door. His silence was characteristic and comforting in the moment.

And with little more than a quiet grunt, he flopped sideways into the carpet like a dead fish.

The woman tilted her head in confusion. Snow sucked in an unguarded gasp. I took an instinctive step forward.

His jacket was unbuttoned and flopped open to one side to reveal a blooming splotch of red. The liquid was quickly absorbing into the fibers of the white cotton shirt, which could not contain its volume. His breathing, if he was breathing, was shallow and quiet. I did a mental inventory of the man’s body with which I was so familiar.

But it didn’t take a surgeon or a lover to know where the heart was located.

I wasn’t close enough to be certain, but the woman was and she seemed to be convinced. The muzzle of her gun, however, was pointed up above my shoulder, not down at the fallen Turk, nor at myself or my compatriot.

Reno limped forward, purple face emerging from the shadows, and dropped the gun I had left him at Snow’s feet. It was hers, anyway. The ridiculously sized silencer was still in place. His now free hand gripped the frame as he leaned weakly in the doorway.

“I,” he wheezed, “have about _fucking had it_ ,” he paused again to hack, “with Rufus.”

The woman’s laugh burst forth in howling yips.

I had always been told that Scarlet, head of Weapons development, laughed like a drunk hyena.

 


	5. Take care of the proper paperwork

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Reno actually does his job well.

None of us move as he staggers down the stairs.

Scarlet is too taken with her own amusement, braying like a donkey with her head thrown back in carelessness.  She holds the gun outward, but her arm sags and her aim is greatly impaired by the well-manicured nails that are swiping away tears just underneath a blur of mascara.

It’s too overzealous to be sane and too sane to be real. A combination of madness and strength barks in the grating sound of her laughter.

Snow is frozen, save a small quiver in her right hand—the side she keeps her handgun strapped on. But the fingers don’t move, only tremble in place, and so the tiny motion looks more like horror. Or fear.

I am stopped on a similar plane. Snow and I are experiencing time at the same rate, seconds behind Scarlet, hours behind Reno. Snow and I lock eyes for a brief moment and something she finds there amplifies the distress.

Concern is somewhere in there. I’m sure. It must be. The sense of indignation and a feral screech of territorial rage rises higher, but doesn’t take control. My fingers do not tremble as Snow’s do. But they don’t move either. Ever the soldiers, they silently await orders, and the brain watches in agonizing silence as the events unfold, poised at the ready to wave on the attack.

There is a loud _scrape-stomp, scrape-stomp_ as he drags himself through the entrance way, between Snow and myself. He stands in the middle of us and ahead of us and nobody here lacks the pure, animal sense that this means he’s the alpha.

Scarlet halts her cackling too abruptly too croon at Reno. The makeup around her eyes is smudged, but she is still a masterpiece of brushstrokes. She’s taken some time preparing for battle with only the tools nature has bestowed her and it is difficult not to admire for a moment.

She’s a very handsome woman.

“And what,” she actually pauses to inspect her nails, “can I do,” before batting her eyelashes up, “can I do,” and artfully ignoring the grotesquery of his battered face, “for an _old friend_ like you?”

He _scrape-stomp, scrape-stomp_ s the rest of the way to her oversized mahogany desk. I wonder, idly, how many people it took to move the thing in here. Rude’s body lies prone directly to his left.

He doesn’t even look down.

“Word is you’re hiring,” Reno tells her, extending a hand.

She sets the handgun on the top of the table and the heavy _clunk_ it makes resonates within both Snow and myself. We glance sideways again in the same moment, attempting to gauge the other’s reaction.

But the woman is still moving. She has read his mind like an ex-wife.

There is a graceful fluidity in her motions as she pulls a polished silver case from the bust of her red evening gown and opens it in one swift motion, presenting it to the redhead like a magician with a deck of cards. He selects one of the elegantly rolled cigarettes inside and snatches an engraved lighter off of the desk, moving backwards to lean on it beside her as he cups the flame to his mouth.

“You keep this shit?” he inquires. The cigarette flops in his mouth as the words escape. He flips the lid of the lighter closed with a flick of his wrist. There’s something engraved on it, but I’m too far to see what. I have a good idea, though.

“Red keys open red doors,” she replies cryptically with a dangerously alluring smirk.

He shrugs nonchalantly and hands the hung of metal back to her.

“Trouble in paradise?” she glances distastefully on the stain on her rug underneath a hunk of flesh that might still be a man.

“Business dispute,” he explains between drags. He seems calmer now that he’s had his fix. As if this was the sole source of his pain, not the swollen mess of his face or his dragging leg.

Snow eyes me warily. She can tell their speaking a language we know, but it’s a dialect she doesn’t comprehend. I barely comprehend it myself.

She rises to her feet, towering above him in stilettos it must have taken years of training to master. “I’ll assume this is a package deal,” she glances between us remaining women. A distaste scrunches her dignified face into a contempt too severe to be genuine. Her eyes linger on me for too long.

“Did I shoot those ones?” he asks, reaching out his hand to flick ash on her already ruined carpet.

Her fury is immediately apparent, but only sweet tones make it past the guarding her of her tongue; “Then you can begin by cleaning up your _mess,_ Reno.” She doesn’t look at either one of us as her heels click sharply on the tiled floor. “We’ll discuss terms in the morning.”

The door slams loudly, belying the rage, and Snow jumps for a moment in surprise of the sound. This woman’s power isn’t particularly impressive, but her demeanor makes it difficult to read.

Reno drops the stub of his cigarette on the floor and grinds it into the carpet a bit too roughly with his good foot. He raises a finger, “You two halfwits,” it sways between Snow and myself, “fucking _owe me_.”

He doesn’t spare us another glance as he _scrape-stomp, scrape-stomp_ s back towards the arduous stairs. He’s halfway drug himself up them, when Snow finally manages to put words to everything that’s transpired before her.

She only needs one.

“Rude.”

His head turns only marginally, not to look at her, but to quiet his hiss; “ _You_ called him, Princess. _You_ take care of it.”

She doesn’t respond and her expression doesn’t falter for a moment, but the words overwhelm her and the tears collect, unshed in her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure if I want to make this an actual rescue story or I'm just bored.


End file.
